Artificial Neural Networks

There are a number of different perspectives which can be taken to describe artificial neural networks, and in fact, as there is a very diverse set of procedures which go under the name of “artificial neural networks”, it would be difficult to come up with a definition which encompasses all the various techniques. The traditional definition, a version of which can be found in any of the seminal textbooks or review articles (for example Haykin), draws analogies between artificial neural networks and the neural networks found in biological organisms (such as the human brain). However, I believe that artificial neural networks, often referred to simply as neural networks (or NNs) when it is clear from the context that we are talking about the artificial kind, could be equally as well described simply as a mathematical or computational tool, which can be used to categorize input data into two or more output sets. For a more mathematical treatment of neural networks see for example Bishop.